Brief History of the Theory of Plate Tectonics

I stumbled across my copy of the book Principles of Physical Geology written by Arthur Holmes in 1944.  He wrote the book while Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Edinburgh. It is interesting that he wrote the book in the United Kingdom during World War II.  The final chapter is on Continental Drift which is now called Plate Tectonics.  He discusses the work of Alfred Wegener in the early 1900's and includes some of Wegner's reconstruction of the continents through geologic time.  The final section is on the search for the mechanism for continental drift.  He put forth the idea of convection cells a mechanism for the drift of the continents.  He includes two cross section depicting the convection cells.  One section shows the mid-oceanic ridges as spreading centers creating new oceans.  It doesn't appear that he understood subduction zones.

It wasn't until the 1960's and 1970's that science proved that Wegener and Holmes were largely correct with their theory.  It required new technology to uncover the "secrets" of plate tectonics:  mapping of the ocean floors, marine magnetic surveys (using instruments designed in World War II to search for submarines), the discovery of the reversals of the earth's magnetic field, paleo magnetism, recognition that the mid-ocean ridges are spreading centers, a global network of sensors in the 1960's for the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963, and deep sea core samples from the Glomar Challenger.

Dust jacket of Holmes' geology textbook.

 

Holmes' chapter on Continental Drift.

 

Wegener's reconstruction to the continents in Late Carboniferous, Eocene and Early Pleistocene (from Holmes,1944).

  

The cross sections from Holmes' chapter on Continental Drift.

Key Events in the Formation of the Theory of Plate Tectonics

• 1596 Abraham Ortelius recognized that the coast of the Americas and Europe and Africa appear to have been joined a sometime and then pulled apart.
• 1912 Alfred Wegner hypothesized that the continents had a onetime all been joined together.  He named the super continent Pangea.  He termed the process continental displacement.  Unfortunately during his lifetime the theory was not accepted by the scientific community.
• 1929 Arthur Holmes proposed that convection currents were mechanism of the movements of the continents and the formation of new oceans.
• 1950's  Mapping of the topographic features of the ocean floor reveals underwater mountain ranges in the mid oceans with great vertical relief and extending for thousands of miles.
• 1960  Harry H. Hess, American geophysicist, proposed the idea that oceanic crust forms was from the mid-ocean ridges and spreads laterally in opposite directions.
• 1961 Robert S. Dietz, American geophysicist, named Hess' process as sea floor spreading and further advanced the theory of plate tectonics. 
• 1963 Frederick J. Vine and Drummond H. Matthews, British geologists, and Laurence W. Morley, Canadian geophysicist, discovered the "magnetic strips" that symmetrically parallel the spreading centers at the oceanic ridges due to the paleo magnetism and reversals of the earth's magnetic poles.
• 1960's Global network of sensors it set up to detect nuclear tests as a result of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty signed in 1963.  The data revealed the pattern of earthquakes is concentrated along the continental edges.
• 1968 The ship Glomar Challenger collects core samples from the Atlantic ocean and reveals the age of the sediments increase in age away from the spreading centers.

 Source for the above section: Encyclopedia Britannica

 

Alfred Wegener (1880-1930

 

Screen capture from YouTube from The Amoeba People, a humorous take on Wegner's lack of scientific acceptance until decades after his death by freezing in the ice field of Greenland.  Harry H. Hess at the blackboard during a presentation.

 

Continental Drift: Alfred Wegner, The Amoeba People, YouTube

 

Arthur Holmes (1890-1965) Photo: 1912

 

Holmes published the second edition of Principles of Physical Geology in 1963. This when the concept of plate tectonics was becoming more widely accepted by the scientific community.  When he died in 1965 he was most remember for his working on radiometric dating and the geological time scale.  His work on plate tectonics as early as 1929 was largely forgotten.